


the Return to Shore

by TheGoldenGhost



Category: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers | Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
Genre: 'Emotional Growth' isn't even a tag, Comfort, Comfort/Angst, Emotional Healing, Gen, Healing, I never use AO3 just to READ I don't know what any of the relevant tags are, how about, i don't know how else to tag this?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25012768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGoldenGhost/pseuds/TheGoldenGhost
Summary: After escaping the Nautilus and resting up on the Lofoten islands, Pierre Aronnax seems to still be mentally stuck aboard the ship. Ned Land, concerned for his well-being, confronts him about it.
Relationships: Pierre Aronnax & Ned Land
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	the Return to Shore

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I've offered up like... what, nine fics to the TKLUTS fandom now? And NONE of them were focused on Ned and Pierre being buds? I can't believe this!
> 
> Well, that's what this fixes. I hope you enjoy!

The Lofoten Islands were cool and unassuming, a marvelous place to heal and get one’s bearings. Every day, Pierre Aronnax went out like the tide to wait by the shoreline, staring, searching, waiting. Every evening, he came in, looking like a ghost. His eyes, blue in the dark and deep shade of the ocean, were haunted and full of questions.

Ned wanted to ask him why he made his exodus down to the waterline every day just to sit and stare at the water. He assumed it was part of the healing process; paranoia, maybe, fear of seeing that evil dark shape lurking on the horizon. Or maybe the professor was simply getting reacquainted with the sea he loved so much – still loved, apparently, after all its horrors. Ned, on the other hand, was considering taking a long break from whaling if he could.

He told the professor one day, when Pierre was about to make his daily exit, that he didn’t need to worry. “You don’t need to keep a vigil. He can’t find us here,” Ned said. “We’re not in his element anymore. We’re safe,” he tried for a smile, clapped the professor on the shoulder. “You know he never goes ashore. If he lived, he’s long gone.”

Pierre’s face had remained blank, unmoved. “Thank you, Ned,” he said quietly, and went out anyway.

Frustrated and worried, Ned had gone to Conseil about it. “You think his injury is putting him out of it? He hit his head pretty hard.” For days after their flight from the _Nautilus_ , Pierre had remained unconscious, with neither of his friends knowing if he’d live or be the same if he awoke.

Conseil, though, had remained enigmatic as usual. “Monsieur is simply recovering in his own way. He is comforted by going down to the water. I think we should allow him. After all, he is not harmed by doing this.”

But Ned wasn’t sure. As the days wore on, with Pierre going in and out, still seeming like a shell of himself, Ned found himself wishing they _had_ stayed aboard the _Nautilus_ for just one day longer – just long enough that he could choke the life out of Captain Nemo for doing this to his friend.

But they hadn’t. And Ned had to simply be content with what was happening now – Pierre was badly shaken, and some part of him still needed to keep a close guard.

All the same, it bothered him. And so, after three weeks without change, Ned finally came to a point where he followed Pierre down to the shoreline.

He was sitting on a rock near the water’s edge, not close enough to touch it, but close enough to hear its song and to see the tiny fish that flickered in and out through the crevasses between the stones. Ned approached and with a mild grunt clambered up beside him. The rock was slippery, but a welcome point of stability compared to the changing sea.

“Professor?” Ned asked, a force of old habit. Pierre had asked him upon their rescue to call him by his first name.

“What is it, Ned?” Pierre replied.

“I just wondered if you were ready to come back to the house. You come down here every day, and I just…” he trailed off, realizing with a twinge of annoyance at himself that he ought to have planned out what he was going to say. “I was thinking, maybe you should write out the story of our adventure. Keep a log of it, you know? We saw a lot, and all that new knowledge could be a real help to science.” Not to mention, Ned thought, that it would give the armies of the world a good enough description of Captain Nemo that they could track him down, prevent anyone else from meeting the same fate that he and his friends had.

“I’ll write it, Ned, yes,” Pierre said softly. “But not today. Not right now. I’m thinking.”

“It looks to me more like you’re stuck,” Ned said. “Stuck on the _Nautilus._ We got free for a reason, Pierre. It was so we could live our lives without ties to – to that man, and that ship.”

Pierre visibly tensed. “I know. I know.”

“Do you wish we’d stayed?”

“No,” Pierre’s voice was still low, strained. “No, I knew it was time. Nemo was no longer… healthy, or acting in a rational manner. We weren’t safe. If we’d stayed we very likely would have ended up going down with the _Nautilus_. I don’t know how long Nemo intends to keep sailing,” Ned might have mistaken the catch in Pierre’s voice, but he didn’t think so.

“Right,” Ned said. “I think you’re absolutely right about that, Pierre,” he sat with his legs half-crossed, staring out at the same water but, in spite of his excellent vision, not seeing what Pierre saw. “I don’t understand why you’re still so attached.”

“The science. The discoveries.”

“Conseil had all that, and he’s managed to leave it behind.”

“The adventure. Every day, something new and wonderful and maybe even a little scary.”

“Yeah, that part was nice, I admit. I think I’ll miss that a little. But there’s something to be said for stability, and I can get enough adventures to fill a lifetime just by sailing on a decent whaling vessel.”

“And… well, Nemo.”

“Nemo?” Ned glanced over at Pierre, his anger burning at the sound of the captain’s name, but this fury was not directed at Pierre, only because his natural reaction to hearing of his enemy was to get riled. He quashed it down quickly. No point in getting upset at a man who was very likely dead, and certainly there was no cause to take it out on his wounded and suffering friend. “The man who took us prisoner? The man who would have let us rot at the bottom of the sea wrapped in sealskin? Who would have had us laid to rest in a tomb our families could search the globe and never find, and called it a proper burial? The man who fed us nothing but his own sour palate, called us free when we weren’t, drugged us and lied to us and led us into danger time and time again, every time asking for our help to save his hide from a situation he caused? _That’s_ the man you miss?”

“He was my friend,” Pierre replied.

“Maybe so, but you weren’t his. Friends don’t treat their friends the way he treated you. No matter what you saw in him, Pierre, be it a friend, a hero or a devil, he only ever saw you as one thing; an enemy and a prisoner of war. Anything else was just a veil of politeness.”

Pierre was staring at Ned with a surprising coolness, and it both wounded him and angered him further; that even separated, Nemo should still have sunk his claws into Pierre so deeply that even a brilliant scientist could not see reason. And that even now, Ned still had to feel the effects Nemo wrought on his life. Had he harmed them all permanently? Would they _ever_ escape him? For one awful moment Ned wanted to scream his fury to the sea, but he did not.

“Ned,” Pierre said. “Don’t speak on what you don’t understand. You think you knew what happened between us, but by God, you don’t.”

Ned fell into a sober silence at that, and they both didn’t say anything more for a time. “All the same,” Ned finally continued, “He had no right to do what he did to us. Surely you have to concede that the man was a tyrant?”

“I don’t have to concede any such thing,” Pierre responded.

“But to make prisoners of men who’d done him no harm! To murder innocent sailors at sea out of mere madness and treachery!”

“It was out of vengeance,” Pierre said. “Not madness, not treachery. I don’t excuse what he did. I tried to talk him out of it, and he would hear nothing of it,” he stared out to the sea, his face drawn and weary. “But even so, I wonder what either of us would have done in his place.”

“Certainly not murdered innocent men,” Ned snorted. “I would never have, and neither would you.”

“Are you so certain? Suppose those innocent men had killed your parents, your wife and your children? Suppose they had taken over Quebec – your very home – and when you tried to fight back they banished to the seas as an exile. And suppose they remained there, enslaving your homeland to this day. Would you not be at least tempted to strike back at them?”

Something in Ned’s heart shifted, and he felt cold and bitter at the thought. He had no wife or family and his parents were long dead, but… he could imagine it. The thought was dark and full of corruption. “Are you defending a murderer?”

“Are you condemning a man whose motives you admit you don’t know?” Pierre asked, and then sighed. “No, Ned, I’m not defending him. But I’ve often thought since that night, off and on, about what I would do in his place. I don’t mean merely seeing a ship of an enemy nation. France has had many enemies in her years. But had that nation been responsible for taking from me my entire family, and hunted and attacked me even in my adopted home… well, I think the decision would not be so easily made.”

“The men aboard that ship couldn’t have been the same ones who did his family in – _if_ that’s what happened,” Ned snapped back. “And even if they were, what does it matter? Killing them didn’t help any of the dead at all.”

“No,” Pierre shook his head, fiercely. “No, it didn’t. It didn’t, I know that. I know he was wrong, and that he was wicked, and troubled, and miserable and unstable. And I know that I shouldn’t feel for him the way I do. The way I still do…”

“That he was your friend?” Ned snorted.

“My friend? God, Ned…” Pierre turned away sharply, his voice breaking, and Ned realized he was crying. “I loved him. I’ve never loved another man like him before, and I can’t imagine doing it again. He… I know my life with him wouldn’t have been safe. But without him, it just feels like I lost the chance at something I’ll never have again.”

“Loved him…” Ned said slowly. “Pierre.”

“What?”

“Do you…” Ned began hesitantly. He had trodden, unawares, onto some deep and difficult ground, and would have to move delicately now. Dismissing Pierre, well, that would be unforgivable now, like this. “Do you think he loved you back?”

Pierre took a shuddering breath. “Yes. No. I don’t know, honestly. I thought so, but you were right when you said earlier… he didn’t treat me as a friend would. And more than that… I gave him the chance to prove he wanted me and he turned me down.”

Ned didn’t know what to say. “You’ll find other men, you know. Smarter ones, kinder ones. Nemo wasn’t the only person in the world, but if you’d stayed with him, he may as well have been.”

Pierre nodded, still fighting tears. “I know. I know. But it’s hard, Ned. It’s hard when he was so easy to love. You don’t think so, you think I’m being naïve, and foolish. A – a lovestruck romantic who lacks the depth and good sense to know a bad thing when he sees it. But you didn’t know Nemo. Not really…”

“Did you?” Ned asked mildly.

“…No. No I didn’t,” Pierre said finally after thinking about it. The realization seemed to hit him harder than before, and he lapsed into a meditative silence, pondering. “I guess he was too much for any of us to really know. Still. I hope he’s alive and well.”

Ned didn’t, but for Pierre’s sake he knew better than to say so. “Maybe he is,” he said instead. “If there’s anything I learned from living with the man for seven months, it’s that he’s determined and it’s damned hard to bring him down. I don’t know if even the maelstrom could do that.”

Pierre sighed, his breathing slowly returning to normal as his tears subsided and peace came over him again. “I wish I’d said goodbye. Or perhaps, not even done that. Just left him a note. Told him that I’m sorry and that I wish him well. Anything but vanishing without a trace.”

“You’re sorry for leaving?”

“Not for leaving, no. I’m sorry that… that it had to end the way it did. I never owed him a thing but I still feel like it would have been proper of me to at least look him in the eyes before abandoning him. To at least give him some sense of closure…”

“You didn’t abandon him, Pierre. He drove you out.”

“Yes,” Pierre said soberly. “He did, didn’t he?”

“Can I ask you something? If I hadn’t been there, would you have tried to escape? Would you have just stayed on the _Nautilus_ for good?”

“I honestly don’t know. I like to think that I would have gotten wise and left when it was time – which would have been about when we did. But there is a very real chance that I would not,” he looked out at the sea. “It would have been harder to escape without your sailing skills. And moreover, without you, Nemo would have very likely died near the pearl fisheries and the whole adventure would have been different.”

Ned nodded. “You know, I wondered why _I_ had to be taken with you. Why of all people I was there. I don’t mean to question divine plans or anything, but I’m no scientist. I was useless aboard that ship, useless and unwanted besides.”

“Not so! We wanted you there.”

“You did, but the Captain didn’t and nor did his crew. So why was I there? Well, I think you answered that question just now. I was there so that the two of you could eventually get off. So that you could have another chance at living again.”

Pierre stared at him, his eyes full of warmth. They matched the sea in the best of moods, so alike were their colors. Right now, they seemed to be lit by the sun from within. “So you did. And so we do,” he said quietly.

Ned grinned.

“I’ve got a lot to write,” Pierre said. “About our adventures. I don’t intend to leave anything out. Not one thing. When I’m finished, I wonder if you’ll feel the same about the Captain.”

“I’m pretty sure I will,” Ned said.

“Probably so. And maybe… just maybe, I won’t feel the same about him as I do now. Maybe I’ll be able to put this thing to rest. Either way,” he seemed to resolve himself to the task before him, coming slowly back to shore like a bottle flung into the sea from some far and distant world. “There is much for the world to know. And how splendid it is, that I should be the one to tell them!”


End file.
